Dilemma of Lawlessness: Organized Crime, Violence, Prosperity, and Security along Guatemala's Borders (original) (raw)
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Guatemala has been struggling on its road towards consolidated democracy since the mid-80s when its first democratic government was elected following the end of military rule. Internal conflict is no rare occurrence in a country where civil war ended relatively recently, in 1996, and lasted over thirty years. Today, while Guatemala's economy is the largest of Central America, inequality, poverty and social exclusion-particularly of indigenous people, are rife. Organized crime is also a prevalent concern and an imminent threat to the rule of law. Criminal investigations have evidenced how public institutions and policies are compromised by a rotten political finance system with pervasive links with drug trafficking structures. This paper (1) analyzes the legislative framework (and its implementation) for political financing in Guatemala; (2) identifies how organized crime uses those gaps to filter dirty money in politics, and, more generally, in public life; and (3) pinpoints priority areas for sustainable reform. Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this work are the reponsibility of the authors and do no reflect the official policy of the Council of Europe 1. Dirty money in politics, the need for comparative research and the case of Guatemala Political finance has only become a separate subject matter of political science research in recent times. For years, deregulation of the sphere of activities of political parties was the norm, as justified by the need to protect the highest rights of freedom of expression and association.
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Hague Journal on the Rule of Law, 2012
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Professor Sherry B. Ortner, Chair This monograph documents the rise and fall of a vigilante justice movement in order to understand the conditions that enable and hinder collective action in postwar Guatemala. Collective efforts to create a more equitable Guatemala were brutally repressed during its 36 year-long civil war (1960-1996). In the aftermath of this genocidal conflict, most Guatemalans seek better futures through individual projects such as education and migration. Security represents one domain where efforts at collective organizing remain strong. Guatemala City boasts one of the highest homicide rates in the region and less than 5% of crimes are prosecuted. Communities throughout the country have responded to this security crisis by organizing extralegal security patrols. These organizations resemble the civil patrols that Maya men were forced to join during the civil war. Adult men take turns patrolling the streets, apprehending wrongdoers, holding court and meting out punishment. Unlike their wartime incarnation, control is now entirely in local hands and "gangsters" have replaced "communists" as the targets of iii disciplinary action. This study is based on a total of two years of participant observation and interviewing in Todos Santos Cuchumatán, a predominantly Mam-Maya community in rural Huehuetenango. While the influence of wartime paramilitarism is profoundly felt, I argue that efforts to make and contest security involve the creative recombination of a wide range of discourses, including human rights, capitalist commonsense, zero-tolerance policing, Marxism, and Maya conceptions of personhood. Delineating and historicizing these multiple strands is essential for understanding the proliferation of violence in postwar Guatemala. Chapter one looks at what makes lynching possible. Chapter two explores vigilante leaders' justifications for their actions. Chapter three recounts the experiences of accused gangsters. Chapter four uses the exile of one "gangster" to explore how exclusion creates community. Chapter five focuses on debates over the legality of alcohol to understand the ambiguous legal position of the rights of indigenous people. While Guatemala represents an extreme case, many of the trends on display here, including the privatization of security, the economic obsolescence of young men, the forging of communal identities through violent exclusions, and moral panics about mind-altering substances, reverberate elsewhere. iv The dissertation of Ellen Jane Sharp is approved.
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Journal of Law and Conflict Resolution, 2013
This study analyzes the contested authorities that deal with land and criminal conflict in the Ixil Region of Guatemala. We studied the local laws, customs and actors governing the use of violence, conflict resolution and justice. Actors included indigenous NGOs, individual leaders (community and municipal), youth gangs, armed security patrols, and organized criminal networks. Findings suggest that the Guatemalan State competes for authority with alternative forms of governance in the Ixil Region of Guatemala. Specifically, control over violence and rulemaking are contested and negotiated across three institutional categories: methods of control imposed by local security groups and organized criminal networks; indigenous and constitutional law; and municipal, auxiliary and indigenous mayors. Our findings suggest that while violence may be reduced to the extent that these social networks overlap, weak rule of law will continue to negatively impact human rights and security in this region.
Private security in Guatemala: The pathway to its proliferation. Working Paper 144
2010
It has become commonplace to explain the proliferation of private security services as causally determined by crime rates and institutional weakness. By contrast, this paper argues that another explanatory factor needs to be emphasized, especially for post-war societies: continuity and change of social control mechanisms. The paper first presents the current situation with commercial and noncommercial private security services in Guatemala (private security companies, as well as neighborhood security committees). Against this background, it reconstructs mechanisms and critical junctures by which the Guatemalan state sourced out policing functions to the private sector during the war, and traces the reinforcement of these mechanisms in the post-war society. It argues that the proliferation of private security services is an outcome of the overlapping of different political processes and sequences. The continuity of social control mechanisms thereby emerges as a stronger explanatory f...